Memoir Russia

My Russia is an autobiography that traces Jill Dougherty's fascination with Russia and shares the insights into the country, its people, and its leader she has gleaned through forty years of reporting. Listeners will see Russia's evolution through the eyes of the dedicated and compassionate woman they have watched on cable since 1983.

Red Notice is a searing expose of the wholesale whitewash by Russian authorities of Magnitsky's imprisonment and murder, slicing deep into the shadowy heart of the Kremlin to uncover its sordid truths.

Spymaster, defector, double agent....Here is the remarkable true story of the man who ran Russia's post-cold-war spy program in America. The revelations are stunning. Many spies have told their stories. None has the astonishing immediacy, relevance, and cautionary warnings of Comrade J.

Volume One of Stalin begins and ends in January 1928 as Stalin boards a train bound for Siberia, about to embark upon the greatest gamble of his political life. He is now the ruler of the largest country in the world, but a poor and backward one, far behind the great capitalist countries in industrial and military power, encircled on all sides. In Siberia, Stalin conceives of the largest program of social reengineering ever attempted.

When Browder’s young Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was beaten to death in a Moscow jail in 2009, Browder cast aside his business career and made it his life’s mission to pursue justice for Sergei. One of the first steps of that mission was to uncover who had killed Sergei and profited from the $230 million corruption scheme that he had exposed. As Browder and his team tracked the money that flowed out of Russia—through the Baltics and Cyprus and on to Western Europe and the Americas—they discovered that Vladimir Putin himself was one of the beneficiaries of the crime.

In June 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, Lyudmila Pavlichenko left her university studies and ignored the offer of a position as a nurse to become one of Soviet Russia's 2,000 female snipers. Less than a year later, she had 309 recorded kills, including 29 enemy sniper kills. She was withdrawn from active duty after being injured. She was also regarded as a key heroic figure for the war effort.

From the acclaimed author of JFK and Vietnam comes a book that uncovers the government's role in the Kennedy assassination more clearly than any previous inquiry. What was the extent of the CIA's involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald? Why was Oswald's file tampered with before the assassination of John F. Kennedy? And why did significant documents from that file mysteriously disappear? Oswald and the CIA answers these questions, not with theories, but with information from the primary sources themselves.

Infused with the political passion and turmoil of the Vietnam era, Secrets is the memoir of a daring man, a story about what it takes to make a dramatic life-change in the context of moral challenge, an expose of Washington power politics, and a searing portrait of America at a perilous modern crossroads.

If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6.

Mark Galeotti is the go-to expert on organized crime in Russia, consulted by governments and police around the world. Now, Western listeners can explore the fascinating history of the vory v zakone, a group that has survived and thrived amid the changes brought on by Stalinism, the Cold War, the Afghan War, and the end of the Soviet experiment.

In 1795, Catherine the Great of Russia was in search of a bride for her grandson Constantine, who stood third in line to her throne. In an eerie echo of her own story, Catherine selected an innocent young German princess, Julie of Saxe-Coburg, aunt of the future Queen Victoria. Though Julie had everything a young bride could wish for, she was alone in a court dominated by an aging empress and riven with rivalries, plotting, and gossip—not to mention her brute of a husband. She longed to leave Russia and her disastrous marriage, but her family in Germany refused to allow her to do so.

Helen Rappaport, an expert in the field of Russian history, brings you the riveting day-by-day account of the last 14 days of the Russian Imperial family, in this first of two books about the Romanovs. The brutal murder of the Russian Imperial family on the night of July 16 to 17, 1918, has long been a defining moment in world history. The Last Days of the Romanovs reveals in exceptional detail how the conspiracy to kill them unfolded.

In With God in Russia, Ciszek reflects on his daily life as a prisoner, the labor he endured while working in the mines and on construction gangs, his unwavering faith in God, and his firm devotion to his vows and vocation. Enduring brutal conditions, Ciszek risked his life to offer spiritual guidance to fellow prisoners who could easily have exposed him for their own gains.

This is the extraordinary story of Vasily B. Emelianenko, the veteran pilot of one of the Soviet Union's most contradictory planes of the Second World War - the I1-2. Having flown 80 combat sorties against the Germans, Emelianenko was awarded the highest decoration - the Hero of the Soviet Union. He went on to complete a total of 92 sorties; his plane was shot down three times; and on each occasion, he managed to pilot the damaged aircraft home. Emelianenko's vivid memoirs provide a rare insight into the reality of fighting over the Eastern Front and the tactics of the Red Army Air Force.

When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR was one of the world's two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism and had made enemies of radicals on the right and left. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save.

From the dark days of World War II through the Cold War, Sergey A. Kondrashev was a major player in Russia’s notorious KGB espionage apparatus. Rising through its ranks through hard work and keen understanding of how the spy and political games are played, he “handled” American and British defectors, recruited Western operatives as double agents, served as a ranking officer at the East Berlin and Vienna KGB bureaus, and tackled special assignments from the Kremlin.

Lea Ypi grew up in the last Stalinist country in Europe: Albania, a place of queuing and scarcity, of political executions and secret police. While family members disappeared to what she was told were "universities" from which few "graduated," she swore loyalty to the Party. In her eyes, people were equal, neighbors helped each other, and children were expected to build a better world.

Timothy Snyder opens a new path in the understanding of modern nationalism and 20th-century socialism by presenting the often overlooked life of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, an important Polish thinker at the beginning of the 20th century. During his brief life in Poland, Paris, and Vienna, Kelles-Krauz influenced or infuriated most of the leaders of the various socialist movements of Central Europe and France. His central ideas ultimately were not accepted by the socialist mainstream at the time of his death.

Renowned music historian Simon Morrison reveals the ballet as a crucible of art and politics, beginning with the disreputable inception of the theater in 1776 and proceeding through the era of imperial rule, the chaos of revolution, the oppressive Soviet years, and the recent $680 million renovation project. Drawing on exclusive archival research, Morrison creates a richly detailed tableau of the centuries-long war between world-class art and life-threatening politics that has defined this storied institution.

How did a once faceless bureaucrat, a man whose own wife said he was born under the sign of the vampire, become the idealized face of Russian manhood and its authoritarian leader? Deputy Mayor Putin examines the man behind the myth. We will explore how Putin’s formative years shaped and drove him and how the supporting cast of characters he gathered along the way helped him get to the Kremlin’s inner sanctum.